The dilemmas of the innovation professionals

Ral Ciro Matas Reyes

University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
1.0. Abstract
The culture of the innovation and entrepreneurship, with its glamorous aesthetic and epic
narrative has become in the last decades part of the collective imaginary when it comes to
business. Now we are many the professionals that work in this field and sometimes feel stuck
between the bullshit of the official discourses and the complex reality of the innovation
processes. What is innovation? Why has it become so popular? Who is in charge of promoting
innovation and who benefits out of it? How do we deal with the innovation teams we work for?
Can we actually teach innovation? This paper is an attempt to critically analyse innovation
facilitation and management by addressing the concept from 4 different points of view, aiming
to give workers that has chosen this career a background to reflect about their professional
practise.

2.0. The discourse of the innovation

When you enter for the first time to Demola Budapests coworking space, at the Budapest
University of Technology and Economics (BME), its easy to get impressed by the coffee
machines noises; groups of youngsters playing videogames; small teams of engineers and
designers working between laughter in their early-stage business projects. In this factory hall
where the innovation lab is hosted, most of the companies that are been incubated can be
described as 2 desks with few computers and a name plaque; where young entrepreneurs design
products and services from scratch, and try to take a chance to reach the market, succeed and
scale. Different people, with different attitudes, projects, disciplines and dreams seem to coexist
in harmony at the same physical location; driven by the desire to bring to life a new meaningful
product or service to their fields of interest or expertise. In other words, to innovate.

While working here, I got the feeling that there is something romantic about coming everyday
to fight for your business idea; in an atmosphere of sometimes joy, sometimes stress,
sometimes failure, in which each team overcome common fears attached to start running their
own business, such as the possibility of going bankrupt, or the uncertainty about their income
(Eurostat, 2012). What happens here is the everyday meal of many other incubators and
coworking spaces around Europe, and it brings me back to my experiences as a participant in
entrepreneurship and innovation programmes back the Canary Islands, my place of birth.

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It seems to me, there is a point during your studies in which running your own company becomes
an attractive idea if you are into business culture, and our universities are making this possible,
more and more easily (at least from a theoretical point of view). Now its as simple as opening
your student mail to have access to a whole offer of start your own business programmes run
by an important bank or public institution, hackatons with challenges by famous companies,
start-up competitions with juicy prices, cheap-ass marketing courses and a whole range of
pitching and networking events with motivational speakers to meet the big bosses of the
investment scene in your region.

Is very difficult to say no to this successful life style that is been continuously sold in the form of
opulent caterings, the path of Steve Jobs talks, famous entrepreneurs films and the promise
of money and a page on business history. The romantic story of working for your dreams from
the garage of your house when nobody believed in you and reaching the top of the hierarchy
has been assimilated somehow by many people, that now aim to generate disruptive innovation.
But how have we reached this stage in business culture? Is it casual or is there any macro cause
underlying this trend?

For the last couple decades we have assisted to a speech shift in what regards the priorities of
the economic and educational agendas in the OECD member countries, by the time of concreting
which changes are needed for individuals to be able to adapt to the labour market and how
developed economies can keep growing and maintain their competitivity against new industrial
potencies. This change in the focus has been articulated through the concept of the Knowledge-
Based Economy for those societies in which industrial capitalism is no longer sustainable; what
has led to the creation and adoption of the discourse of innovation and creativity as the drivers
of the economy (Geer, 2017).

Innovation and creativity are two terms with a wide range of definitions that are usually
presented as synonyms although they have different meanings; on one hand creativity, with
more than 400 meanings can be understood as an ability that permits to integrate simple and
complex cognitive processes to create a new idea or thought; is inherent to the human nature
and is as old as the human existence (Esquivias, 2004). On the other hand, Innovation is an
economic concept that started gaining relevance in the 1980s and its referred (in a very
simplified way) to the use of creativity to solve economic problems, by recombining the
knowledge about social processes and existing products and services for the creation of a new
one that is supposed to be better than the previous ones (Geer, 2017).

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And at the same time, the Innovation is part of the trinomial R&D&I (research, development and
Innovation) that is used to measure the research and technological advance of a society in
particular; in which the Innovation represents how can existent knowledge be applied to obtain
capital in order to generate more disruptive knowledge (e.g. money is spent into scientific
research that leads to a discovery that reports a lot of money to their investors) (Ministerio de
Economa y Competitividad, 2013).

Anyway, this definitions on its own cant give us an explanation on why do this discourse has
become so powerful on the national policies of OECD countries. A possible reason of the
transition from industrial capitalism to Knowledge-based economies or Techno-capitalism is that
it has matched a moment in history in which huge new discoveries and technological advances
stopped happening on their own. On the first half of the XXth century and until the collapse of
the Soviet Union, innovation was not central part of the economy-development discourse as
long as remarkable technical advances were continuously happening and the possibilities of
recombining this existing technologies into new revolutionary products were evident (Geer,
2017). There was no need of constituting innovation as an activity itself. Meanwhile, nowadays
the entrepreneurs as innovation agents, need to put a lot of effort into analysing the market for
finding a non-evident need to be covered.

The XXth century, under the umbrella of two World Wars and the Cold War, is probably the
moment of human history in which the most significant technological advances have happened;
driven by the need of the major global potencies to gain a significant military advantage over
their opponents in order to turn the global policies on their favour. In different societies all
around the globe, the imaginary of how the world would look like in the XXIst century was full
of incredible inventions as flying cars, teleporting, standardized commercial flights to the moon
and a large etcetera that in the end never happened. But even if the expectations about
technological change were certainly unrealistic, both Soviet Union and the US spent billions of
dollars on basic scientific and technical research that led to the development of technological
products such as nuclear energy, GPS, artificial satellites or internet, who ended up in big
changes for the civil life (Graeber, 2015).

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought deep changes to the dynamic of State funding,
essentially in the US, and the innovation activities were delegated to the private sector; a trend
that has been generalized in OECD countries and that cause, in practise, that the technological
advances are subordinated to the needs of the market, and in the end, to what the costumers
are willing to pay for or not (idem). The role of the governments nowadays regarding the

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innovation promotion has become to facilitate as much as possible the proliferation of
entrepreneurs (with special focus on digital and technology related activities) in order for them
to innovate by delivering products and services adapted to the demands of their respective
national markets.

This governmental involvement is articulated in the form of incubation and coworking facilities,
technological clusters and open-innovation-friendly spaces, together with public funding subject
to presenting a business project with innovative content; and entrepreneurship programmes,
usually targeted to young people in which participants are introduced to the entrepreneurship
culture and are guided by experts to give birth a business idea. However, it looks like the actual
innovative entrepreneurship approach put the focus on producing a massive amount of business
ideas and micro-ventures by using standardised processes, hoping that a small percentage of
those early stage business projects will be materialised into a successful company at a certain
point in the future.

This way of generating innovation by somehow bureaucratising the business building processes
and democratizing the access to venture creation education brings a lot of bullshit into the
innovation and entrepreneurship discourse, in a way in which the entrepreneurs are been told
a story that doesnt match with the reality of numbers: that they can change the world, be like
Steve Jobs, that everything depends on how hard they work on their business projects, that
everything is a matter of creativity when is not actually like this. On the other hand, since 2016
there is a trend to hear about the end of startups Era in the tech market, due to the
monopolization by big companies (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) of all the
valuable products and services that can cover mayor costumer needs in the global scene.

This means that, the classical concept of innovation articulated by small entrepreneurs in the
tech sector is becoming more and more difficult to materialise as long as the new valuable tech
fields, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR) or Cryptocurrencies, require
resources that are not available to micro-companies or early stage business projects. In other
words; entrepreneurs in digital products and services are relegated to niche markets where the
possibilities to scale are low because tech giants are in better conditions to generate more
complex technological outputs (Evans, 2017).

The argument exposed by Evans (2017) can be as well supported by Schumpeters contributions
to innovations studies in which he theorize about the routinization of innovation as the moment
in which the innovation processes are institutionalized and entrepreneurship is replaced by big
businesses with teams of trained specialists, something that started happening in the tech sector

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some years ago (Hospers, 2005). At the same time, we can assume that we are stuck in this
dynamic due to the lack of new disruptive innovations, that for Schumpeter would have meant
the beginning of a new innovative cycle; what happens by breaking the actual equilibrium of the
economic system.

Maybe it has reach the moment to redefine the way we approach innovation in order to
generate a meaningful impact as professionals in this field, and to stop been part of a discourse
that cant be sustained on a long term. We have to assume that innovation can be articulated
by more processes than entrepreneurship, including innovations generated under the wing of
big institutions or corporations; and we need to take for granted that innovation can come from
non tech-related fields, as well as from civil society.

3.0. Innovation as a purpose

The analysis of the innovation discourse can make us reach the conclusion that, this concept can
be understood not only as a process (we spoke about the recombination of knowledge about
market and existent products and services for creating new ones) but as a purpose itself, due to
the political, economic and social implications that this processes have. This means that when
we consider innovation, in the frame of the knowledge-based economy, as the way to bring
economic growth to OECD countries, what we are actually raising is that innovating should
become a goal for both companies and governments, a task to achieve that transcend the mere
cumulus of processes and their measures; that innovation is not just the car that will drive us to
the progress but that is a destination on its own.

The routinization of innovation that we pointed out before, is in the end referred to the
consequence of considering innovation, not as result of the competence of risk-taking economic
agents in the free trade market, but as a goal to reach that is developed by carefully designed
policies and centralised business strategies. To achieve innovation requires to systematise it, to
bureaucratise it and build up a full set of standardised procedures that simplify the way in which
the problem of how to innovate is addressed, and help venture owners and policy makers to
gain control over the phenomena and reduce the same uncertainty, risks and competition that
drives innovation.

Knowing this is crucial to understand why is in this field proliferating the figure of facilitators for
entrepreneurship and innovation programmes, or innovation managers at big companies and
public institutions. This professions that has recently gained relevance and glamour are an
indicator of the increasing bureaucratization; a stage in which new jobs that mainly consist in
promoting systemic innovation appear. As innovation professionals, we have to consider that

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our role has become to deliver processes that help innovators and their stakeholders to change
the way in which they think, relate, interact and act, for them to be able to produce new
products and services with added value (Midgley & Lindhult, 2017).

But how do we contribute to this system and which is our place in it? If we follow the thesis that
in the last years, big companies and institutions have taken over the entrepreneurs as innovation
drivers, we might be able to locate ourselves at a specific spot in this innovation systems
articulated from above. First thing to notice is that innovation in knowledge-based economies is
articulated by innovation networks that consist of nodes and linkages among different spatial
locations (Martin, 2013). For example, Silicon Valley, one of the most famous tech hubs in the
world if not the most known for been the birth place of companies such as Intel, Apple, Amazon
or eBay, is portrayed by the end of XIXth century under the wing of telegraph, radio and military
technologies, with a big boost in terms of knowledge by the Stanford University, with its State
funded technology development and research. Out of this research elite, several entrepreneurs
popped out and started their own commercial-oriented companies applying the existent
knowledge in computational sciences (specially during the Cold War with the creation of
ARPANET, the predecessor of Internet).

In this system, the University, each newly created company, investment fund, State and
industrial partner is a node (actor) of a network that is linked by different kinds of ties, either
commercial, personal or governmental in which there is knowledge and resource transfer; then
this network produces a spatial concentration of innovation activities that make new players
orbit around it (idem). The innovation networks existed before the actual OECD members
reached the conclusion that innovation should become the protagonist of the economic
progress, so this networks are born without innovation-awareness, and in them entrepreneurs
are in charge of materialising the knowledge transfer into innovative products and services with
commercial use.

The difference with the actual innovation focus is that hubs like Silicon Valley were created in
an organic way due to the aggregate of different factors. Seen the success of this environment,
different regional governments have tried to artificially inoculate by policy articulation the
conditions for this innovation networks to appear and grow, aiming for regional competitiveness
and using public resources and contacts from other kinds of networks to make this possible
(Midgley & Lindhult, 2017). On the other hand, consolidated giants that were once start-ups
during the boom of the phenomena have taken advantage of existent innovation networks to
monopolise the market, by buying promising smaller tech companies that could dispute the

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market leadership. An example of this is the purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp by Facebook
or Youtube by Google.

In what regards the private sector we could think that there is a reverse trend by the tech giants
to adopt closed innovation models in which there is a vertical integration of the whole
innovation process characterised by a big control of the company of the product and service
creation, which would be very time and resource consuming; but actually the big companies get
benefited by the open innovation approach of innovation networks with resource sharing
systems, composed by several commercial nodes and links (Chesbrough, 2003). This allows the
company to buy and integrate products and services that are already successful in what regards
market penetration and dedicate the resources to develop experimental and more complex
technologies for a mid or long term run.

In both the public and private sector, innovation professionals play a major role in maintaining
the innovation systems working smoothly as long as we are part of the agents that joint the
organisational cosmovision in a performative dimension. We work directly with the
entrepreneurs and teams of technical professionals among different organisations and our tasks
consist, in one way or another, in funnelling the creative potential of the individuals of our
environment into a product or service suitable for the market. We act as mediators between the
official discourse and its contradictions in our professional environment; as lawyers that know
the rules of the game and need to drive our costumers to a successful trial with the market. We
deliver the standardised methodologies that drive some teams of young entrepreneurs to the
top and some of them to a pile of drafts in a drawer that will never see the light.

Its interesting to observe that systemic innovation is an outcome of the marriage between two
dialectically opposed worlds: the institutional one, with its aversion to risk and trend to seek for
control by organising itself around a series of long term oriented inorganic (bureaucratic)
processes, that reduce the human implication and its mistakes; and the entrepreneurship one:
risk taking and based on individual and group agreements that require constant negotiation and
connections across different actors, that are been continuously revised and transformed
(Graeber, 2015). For example, the public owned coworkings or the innovation departments are
imagination-friendly, dynamic spaces, integrated under the framework of a big corporation that
are operated by bureaucratic processes, what constrains the creative power of the individuals
taking part in them.

This dialectic battle between bureaucracy and imagination has contradictions that can be easily
perceived by the innovation professionals, that act as a nexus between both realities and bring

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up different dilemmas. One of the most remarkable dilemmas, and the one I would like to focus
on due to its importance from an ethical point of view and for the understanding of our
protagonism in companies and institutions is the answer to: who are we benefiting with our
interventions? In our daily work we have to negotiate the sometimes incompatible expectations
and aspirations of the entrepreneurs and institutions, taking in count that both represent
different paradigms and that there is a situation of structural inequality in which the
corporations have the power to control, filter and discard the early stage projects that are
developed under their influence.

Here the fact that the candidates to entrepreneurs and innovators have an image of the
innovation world that, as we have seen before, doesnt match with the actual functioning of the
venturing schemas and power structures in the market, is of remarkable importance. As long as
we are the ones in the position of either sustaining or dismantling this vision, for helping our
users and colleagues to achieve a product or service in accordance with the expectations of our
bosses and partners; we should ask ourselves if our interventions are really benefiting the
people that we supervise or deliver facilitation for, that are usually the ones placed in the least
powerful positions of our organisations.

Graeber (2015) smartly describes the cosmovision gap that applies to this dilemma, and can light
up how to defend as well the interests of both parts when facilitating. According to the author,
there exist asymmetrical structures of imagination, that are a product of the structural
inequality, which makes the least powerful actors in a hierarchy (in this case the entrepreneurs
and innovation teams) to continuously make an effort to interpret the actions and decisions of
the most powerful actors (the CEO, Director of the institution, etc.), while the last ones doesnt
need or are interested in interpreting and adapting to their way of thinking. In other words, our
users have to spend a lot of energy into understanding the demands of the partner or boss while
on the opposite side this actors dont do the same with them.

On the same track, the glamorous image of the entrepreneur and innovation culture can be seen
as result of this asymmetrical structures, because it tries to give an easy to digest explanation to
a complex phenomena that has a certain relevance in western societies; and it does it by
articulating an epic narrative that is in the end an antithesis of the reality, a negation of the
bureaucracy behind the innovation processes (that we will talk about on the next pages); a
representation of the phenomena built by the imaginative side of this dialectic battle, which is
non by causality aligned with the powerless actors of the hierarchy.

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The problem of the asymmetrical imagination structures is not only that they are unfair, but that
they are convenient for the powerful actors that we work for, due to the impact that this images
have for the task of dragging people and early stage business projects into the innovation
systems; what basically means to provide the institutions and big corporation the essential
nutrients to keep the innovation machinery working. Is at this point where we have the power
as institutional agents to perform an ethical facilitation, by deconstructing the official narrative
and making our users understand the dynamic underlying the structure they are joining; for
them to be prudent, have a meaningful learning process, to be able to critically confront their
differences with the major players and specially, for them to grow as individuals. This way we
will know that, even if innovation can be understood as a purpose, the end doesnt actually
justifies the means.

4.0. Innovation as a process

When we have talked about the bureaucratization of innovation, we have referred several times
to the delivery of standardised methodologies in innovation and entrepreneurship programmes
as a way of systematising the production of tech based business ideas. This brings up a
conception of innovation that is strongly related to our profession; the understanding of
innovation (as we mentioned before) as a process. This approach is less frequently used but it
makes sense to the cause of our reflection, as long as facilitators and innovation managers guide
the individuals under their responsibility through a series of steps that start from a still immature
idea to a tangible creation ready to be implemented (Garud et al, 2013). The process conception
of innovation give us a picture of which concrete tasks we are able to develop among the
organizations in which we work, and help us to define differences and similarities between the
facilitators and managers, taking in count which processes are controlled by who.

In our field, we should know there are several procedures related to innovation and that we can
englobe them into three main stages depending on the moment in which they are situated;
between the very first idea to the final delivery to the market. According to Garud et al (2013),
the first is the invention phase, an exploratory period in which the individuals involved in the
innovation generate ideas, by recombining existent products and knowledge within multiple
fields of studies; at this point the recombination of ideas can be accelerated by the knowledge
brokers in the team, a role that we will discuss in a while due to its linkage to our profession. On
second place it comes the Development stage, the phase that corresponds to the elaboration of
an artefact whether is tangible or not, that is adapted to a market need and is built over the
existent knowledge recombined during the invention step and beyond. Here, the corporate

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teams work on developing a product or service, while the innovation networks create platforms
that agglutinate multiple actors that will work towards the same goal.

Then, the built solution reaches a point after some iterations, in which is ready to be
implemented and keep evolving depending on the acceptance of the market or the organisation,
and the challenges appearing during this process. The companies encourage industry members
and other stakeholders to adopt their solutions in order to push the extension of its use; while
among the networks, the actors involved in their creation still cooperate but compete and try
to reach agreements to share the benefits of the implementation (idem).

Furthermore, the three stages we have just talked about and that are common to all innovation
processes, present variations depending on the nature of the project and the innovation
networks, which means different models can be applied by a team in order to adapt to the
particularities of the context. We can find several of these, such as the traditional linear model,
the anticipating sales approach, the process with a stoppage, or the process with parallel
activities, that differ from each other in aspects like; if the innovation is started by the company
itself or it responds to the request of a costumer; if the process requires to wait for a market or
technologic conditions to be improved; or If the innovation can be implemented while been
developed or not (Salerno et al, 2014).

Regardless the conceptual abstraction of the innovation processes, when we observe the events
that are attached to each step we realise that our work could be resumed (in its performative
dimension) to the act of facilitating and controlling specific activities during these processes and
identifying and solving problems that are inherent to them. For example, across the innovation
networks there is a flow of knowledge that increases the ability of its actors to innovate, but it
usually encounters lack of absorptive capacity; the situation in which the organization is not able
to integrate the new knowledge over the existent one. This expertise is necessary specially for
phases of invention and development, so professionals acting as knowledge brokers are needed;
professionals with information in domains that are transversal to the core technical know-how
of the team, so the recombination of ideas becomes possible and it improves the outcomes of
the innovation processes (Garud et al, 2013).

As innovation professionals, facilitators and innovation managers have the responsibility,

explicitly or not, to act as knowledge brokers to allow their pupils or technicians to expand their
vision beyond the obvious choices, what we usually call to think outside the box; to give an
empiric background, broad enough to allow the individuals to make their skills converge towards
the creation of an imaginative product. Also, our profession becomes useful by the time of

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overcoming the teams resistance to change during the development stages. What actually
happens while creating the innovative solution is that the groups involved in the task stick to
one of the options, that sometimes might not be the most appropriate for the sake of the
competitiveness or originality of the product or service been created, so the facilitator or
manager might have to intervene to canalize the workforce towards the goal set for the project.

The same way, for innovations within networks, the development and the implementation
processes will require in many cases that the specialists act as a node linking to other actors, in
order to bring resources and knowledge into the team to favour the connections with industrial
and financial partners. We can be drawn in this sense as networking agents as well;
professionals that guide, provide resources valuable for the purpose of innovation and
contributes to generate an environment in which it can occur.

4.1. Differences and Similarities of the Innovation professionals: A process perspective

So far, we have been talking recurrently about the figure of the facilitator and the manager on
the innovation activities as a pack, but when it comes to innovation processes we can identify,
as we previously said, some differences and similitudes between them. On one hand, the
innovation manager is primarily an individual that works within the firms, big companies or
institutions that count with an innovation department and that are involved mainly in closed
innovation processes. The manager drives innovation generally addressed by the use of
traditional linear models (Idea generation-Idea selection-Development-Sales), frequently under
the umbrella of companies that use vertical integration strategies (Chesbrough, 2003). In this
context, the innovation manager supervise teams of researchers and technicians hired by the
same company, and his or her goal is to help to give birth to innovations which increases the
competitivity of the firm.

On the other hand, the innovation facilitator is attached to processes that happen within a
multy-party network in which there are several actors with different interests, power and
connections; it participates in open innovation procedures characterized by taking place in
resource sharing environments, and the role that it takes mostly involve to act as a mediator
between different nodes of the network, favouring the creation and strengthening of its linkages
and hooking up organizations and individuals with similar interests.

However, both professionals use the same tools to achieve their goals. As positions that consist
in invigorating multidisciplinary teams and networks, we use human resources practices to drive
the innovation projects towards one direction or another, applying different techniques with
demonstrated positive effects over the productivity of the workers involved in product

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innovation tasks. Organizational innovation can be applied, for example, by promoting
teamwork, information-sharing, workgroup self-management, capacity of the workers to make
decisions and give suggestions to the organization, etc. The use of this and many other strategies
foster the innovation processes in their different stages, and are a strong common denominator
between the facilitator and manager figures under the currently used perspective (Cozzarin,
2017).

5.0 Innovation as an ability

After all, every time I think about innovation as a procedure; that there are HR practices which
boost the workers capacity to generate successful solutions; that our job consist in creating
conditions for it to happen, like the person who tries to create the atmosphere for a romantic
dinner with his or her partner; I end up with a dilemma that is the alma matter of people coming
from the field of pedagogy. Can we actually teach Innovation? Can we consider innovation as an
ability developable by an educational process?

Recently I read an opinion article about this topic (Phillips, 2016) written by the representative
of an innovation consultancy firm, in which the thesis orbits around the fact that innovation
cant be taught: people can innovate, but innovation itself cant be learned because is in the end
the outcome of a series of tools, techniques and methods with holistic implementation, and at
the same time, he argues that innovation cant be replicated frequently and systematically
enough to become a solid knowledge.

I think this is a valid conception only if we discuss about innovation, mainly as an outcome
instead of as a process, because processes are addressed by performative competences that can
be learned; like if you were learning, for example a receipt to make chocolate biscuits. When
you are trying to learn a receipt, you are basically training procedural competences in which
there is task that requires a series of steps to follow and you didnt know before the training.
And it is as simple as memorizing the steps and ingredients to be able to replicate the product
as many times as you want at any moment, as long as you have the necessary raw materials and
machinery. Under the procedural logic that we have been previously discussing, we could
actually learn to identify, manage and overcome each stage of the innovation processes with an
educational programme.

However, we must go beyond thinking that innovation is just an agglomerate of performative

competences, to not fall on a limited conception of the term. Why? because innovation consist
of complex processes that solve a problem which solution is designed and articulated by stages
in which there are several skills involved, usually provided by the individuals of the team

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themselves. The learnable cookie cutter schema of memorizing, performing and repeating
doesnt apply to innovation because there are many competences other implicated, that rely on
different mental structures (e.g. there are cognitive, attitudinal and performative competences)
that are not common to all the professionals of the group. Coming back to the cookie example,
is not the same to prepare the cookies following the receipt of your family (repetition of
previously shared knowledge), than trying to create a new delicious flavour for a cookie, which
requires recombination of knowledge to address the proposed goal. On the first case there is no
questioning of the procedure, on the second one, the process is put in evidence and re-
propound to create something new, a task that is enriched by adding more people with different
specialities.

Furthermore, innovation as we see from a procedural approach, is not just an individual set of
skills, but a collective one in the sense that innovation usually requires of cross-disciplinary
knowledge and know-how that couldnt be articulated by a single person. The recombination of
knowledge requires, first and foremost, of people that has cognitive and performative
competences in different fields so the knowledge transfer can happen among the team and lead
to a product better than the previous one. Back to the outcome conception of innovation, this
approach focus the problem of the learnability on the invention process, that is the most
complex to sustain from a pedagogical perspective, as long as it cannot be replicated with the
same ease as the development and implementation phases, where specific technical knowledge
in engineering and marketing (for example) can be applied, with a more statistical approach,
and a wider proofed-to-work empirical background in general.

Johnson (2010) approaches in his literature about innovation the issue on how the ideas, (the
main outcome of the invention phase) are born, giving us a very clarifier explanation to the
dilemma of innovation been a learnable skill. The reason why I would say is so complicated to
believe that we can learn to innovate under the outcome perspective, is due to the creative
chaos of this first stage, that seems to not obey any linear or causal process, and that cant be
predicted on time, like how long will it take to reach a good (innovative) idea. The author defend
that the ideas dont pop up randomly, but that the Eureka moments that characterise the
scientific narrative are result of a serendipity that suddenly connect all the traces of knowledge
we had related to it, but that until then were unnoticed by our neuronal system.

By serendipity we refer to an unexpected discovery that happens when we are searching for
something different than our topic of research; a missing piece of the puzzle that suddenly
appears when a new trace of knowledge is added and it triggers the linkage of all our previous

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cognitive baggage. This is not only an individual event, but it can be triggered in a social context
specially if we are talking about work among innovation teams; when the professionals from
different disciplines talk to each other and offer their own perspectives over the same object, it
will cause that some of the team members to have their own Eureka experience, which will be
shared again with the group afterwards and added to the invention process.

Moreover, the serendipity as not predictable in a timeline neither voluntarily inducible it gives
the invention stage a status of pedagogical uncertainty. If the ideas that are brought up by
mental processes and its collective share can be provoked by a wide range of stimuli; how can
we expect to develop on people innovation skills? Johnson highlights inventions whose authors
claimed were inspired on their own dreams, like it was the case of the periodic table and the
theory of the synaptic inhibitory action; not because of a divine revelation, but because of the
imaginative potential liberated by the neuronal connections, that happen during the REM phase
of the sleep, and helped them to relate traces previous knowledge.

As we see, time and unpredictability seems to always be an issue while trying to deal with
innovation under a pedagogical point of view, but this is common to many other sets of skills,
trainable by the use of what we call on Social Education, an Educational Intervention Plan (EIP).
For example, in the formal education system, Schools, High Schools and Universities deliver a
curricula that has several goals regarding the acquisition of attitudinal, performative and
cognitive competences around different topics; however, there are certain skills and
problematics that are not taught by the formal system but by institutions of the non-formal
education, and this can be trained by elaborating an EIP.

The EIPs are the main way to teach competences among a certain group of population in the
field of non-formal education, in which the professional in charge analyses the needs of a group
of individuals and creates an educational intervention to achieve very specific goals regarding a
wide range of topics: awareness about gender violence, healthy entertainment, emotional
management, or in our case, Innovation promotion. The educator will establish a series of skills
and knowledge to be acquired that contributes to reach the goal, in accordance with the
resource and time limitations. Regarding the time, educational plans cant be extended during
a indefinite period, mainly because is both resource consuming, and it makes difficult the setting
of targets to achieve; so we tend to constrain them to few days, weeks, or months.

When asking again ourselves, can innovation be taught? It depends; we can say on one hand
yes, if we consider it a process in which an EIP can be designed for teaching individuals sets of
techniques, models, and market knowledge units that will serve as tools for the innovation team

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to build up their solutions; so we assume that there is no way to teach how to give birth an
innovative idea, but is just possible to give some guidelines that can foster the communication
and knowledge recombination, and we assume that the temporary and resource constrains of
the innovation programmes may play against the quality of the innovation outcomes.

On the other hand, we can say no if what we are aiming to teach is how to generate an
innovation itself; how to systematically create products that can be considered innovative by
applying a predetermined formula, as long as there are not common, predictable and replicable
standards of time, quality and form. Because, there is not a single proper way to achieve
innovation. If we take examples of successful business ideas and we try to build an
standardisable innovation EIP, over the steps that their creators followed, we would probably
fail due to the lack of awareness about the importance of the environment, what is actually a
very common mistake among the speakers and workshops of the innovation scene. The intrinsic
factors of a successful innovation can be rarely used with an educational propose, beyond
serving as mere examples of the implementation of specific techniques that worked under
certain conditions (Johnson, 2010).

As facilitators for innovation programmes, we usually are but we have the obligation to be aware
off, the difference between a well pedagogically built educational intervention, and a low quality
case-based workshop that try to convince the students they can innovate by following a series
of easy steps, inspired in the examples of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, or other famous
entrepreneurs. As educators in this field we should take in count that to facilitate innovation is
not just a standardised delivery action but a broader educational experience in which the
student need as well to develop attitudinal and cognitive background that, regardless of their
dominion of knowledge, allow them to analyse the opportunities of their environment, to
establish goals, to frame their projects under different models and to apply different techniques
to go from one stage of the innovation process to another. In addition, we cant forget that there
are some social and ethical implications in facilitation that should be dealt by giving the students
the capacity to critically approach the problem of what innovation is, who gets benefited of it
and how to work on this kind of experiences fit their personal interests and aspirations in life.

6.0. Conclusions

Innovation is a concept that becomes relevant by the end of the 80s coinciding with the end of
the Cold War. Between the 90s and the 2000s the free market capitalism becomes the
dominant economic system and innovation activities are delegated progressively to the private
sector. With the century change and the emergency of new economic global players, OECD

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countries do a focus shift to increase their competitivity by introducing the Knowledge Economy
and Governments put innovation promotion in the policy agendas; financing programmes and
public infrastructures are created to support the creation and expansion of private ventures with
innovative activities, specially in the tech sector. The innovation and the entrepreneurship
cultures quickly extends and been an innovation facilitator or manager becomes a relevant
professional choice. The mystique and aesthetic of innovation brings up several ethical
dilemmas regarding the role of the innovation professionals to provide meaningful support to
innovators and entrepreneurs in terms of quality, veracity and personal growth, what we have
tried to address in the present paper. To become a good facilitator or manager from an ethical
point of view would consist according to our discussions to understand the different implications
of the innovation and to address the facilitation and managing from a critical point of view,
designing educational programs that foster the individuals capacity to identify, tackle and
overcome the different processes involved in innovation.

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